Investigating rankings in Google's search results pages is part of every SEO's daily chores. From time to time, the odd ranking sticks out like a sore thumb. With sleeves rolled up and my best black hat on, let's try to find out what's happening here.

The keyphrase we're looking at is building jobs. That top result looks a little strange - no mention of the keyphrase in the meta title, page content, or URL begin to raise a suspicious eyebrow. Ok, it's in the description but it just feels a bit wrong. Is this a clever link strategy or a downright dodgy link strategy? Let's dig a notch deeper:

Here's the offending search results page of the google results page for "building jobs" -- the top result looks fishy to me.

How is this website ranking for a phrase that doesn’t appear in its content and meta tags?! Well, let's start by looking at their backlinks. Most of those links are using a noarchive meta tag in their page source..

Check out this page.  If you were to check out the chached text version of the same page, you would see these links near the bottom of the page: ("BusinessLink Derbyshire Engineering Vacancies Web Site Design Derby Construction Vacancies") - hmmmm!

Those links are hidden! If you check out the page itself or the full, non text cached version the links are just not there, plain and simple. Here's a snapshot of the div in the source code: (note the black arrow)

 

I'll wager there are many more examples of this to be found if you investigate all of the backlinks pointing to our domain (and their friends) in question and the domains highlighted in those cached text versions!

What I have found is that over time, those hidden links tend to disappear and reappear. Something tricky is definitely going on, as many of those backlinks don't appear to have a link featured on the page at all.

I'll add a disclaimer now - obviously, not all of these links are in hidden divs. Many are on "links" pages, which is sort of ok if that kind of thing floats your boat. But from what I've hopefully demonstrated here is that regardless of a spam report filled out by yours truly and a LOT of waiting, this network of websites is still in the index. 

Is anyone brave enough to deploy some dynamic div links layers across their network of websites? 

Richard Baxter is Founder and Director of SEOgadget.co.uk, a UK SEO Consulting firm. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz...